Armenian Genocide

On Nov. 4, President Reagan signed the legislation ratifying the United Nations` Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the presence of, among others, representatives from Jewish and Armenian organizations. The ratification was long overdue. However, the President's omission of the Armenian Genocide from his list of peoples subjugated to this subhuman act was an affront to Americans of Armenian descent, and indeed Armenians throughout the world.

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey condemned on Friday a U.S. Senate committee resolution branding the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces during World War One as genocide and warned Congress against taking steps that would harm Turkish-American ties. The nature and scale of the killings remain highly contentious nearly a century after they took place. Turkey accepts that many Armenians died in partisan fighting beginning in 1915, but denies that up to 1.5 million were...

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey condemned on Friday a U.S. Senate committee resolution branding the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces during World War One as genocide and warned Congress against taking steps that would harm Turkish-American ties. The nature and scale of the killings remain highly contentious nearly a century after they took place. Turkey accepts that many Armenians died in partisan fighting beginning in 1915, but denies that up to 1.5 million were...

ZURICH (Reuters) - Switzerland will ask the European Court of Human Rights to review a case involving a Turkish politician who denied that mass killings of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey in 1915 amounted to genocide, the Justice Ministry said on Tuesday. A Swiss court had fined the leader of the leftist Turkish Workers' Party, Dogu Perincek, for having branded talk of an Armenian genocide "an international lie" during a 2007 lecture tour in Switzerland. The European...

Every April 24, U.S. presidents commemorate the official day of remembrance of the Armenian genocide with a speech or statement carefully crafted to avoid use of the word "genocide." U.S. officials have avoided the word because Turkey, a key ally, strongly opposes the characterization to describe the early 20th Century deaths of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of Ottoman Turks. In the past, members of the House and Senate have proposed resolutions calling on...

Helen Paloian started her life without a home. Orphaned as a young child in Armenia, Paloian - then Helen Kherdian - wandered the streets, begging for food and shelter. She witnessed Ottoman Turk soldiers raid her village and deport the locals, just before mass killings that many historians call the Armenian genocide began in 1915, her relatives said. During those killings, she briefly found refuge in an Armenian church but fled when she learned...

Eight years ago when I was traveling in the Caucasus, I decided to stop in the former Soviet republic of Armenia, a country and people I had long wanted to know. What I found was a land of utterly remarkable people that contradictorily struck me as one of the saddest places on Earth. Here was a people who were, until 1915, the dominant and most prosperous ethnic group in Eastern Turkey. Christians, with their own Armenian Orthodox Church and a language that has enriched the ages, their churches, castles...

ZURICH, April 2 (Reuters) - Swiss prosecutors will drop a criminal probe against Turkey's EU affairs minister, instigated after he denied Ottoman Turks committed genocide against Armenians nearly 100 years ago, because he is protected by diplomatic immunity. Zurich prosecutors began investigating minister Egemen Bagis after comments he made at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, and also at a concert in Zurich. Swiss anti-racism legislation...

Khatoun Boyrazian, Armenian Genocide survivor, 86. Survived by children Krikor, Clara, Harout, Linda, Marie; and 13 grandchildren. Predeceased, husband, Yeghishe. Born in Marash, present day Turkey in 1920, in the midst of the Armenian Genocide. Her love will live in our hearts for generations to come. Her survival is the very essence why we will never forget. Visitation Wednesday, 4 to 9p.m. at Skaja Terrace Funeral Home,7812 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Niles, IL. Funeral service, Thursday, 11 a.m. St. Gregory the...

The Obama administration is backtracking on a promised presidential declaration that Armenians were the victims of genocide in the early 20th Century, fearful of alienating Turkey at a time when U.S. officials badly want its help throughout the region. President Barack Obama and other top administration officials have pledged to officially designate the 1915 killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide, a move long sought by many Armenians...

By Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy, Professor of writing, Ithaca College | October 21, 2007

After nearly a hundred years of silence, the United States moved closer recently to speaking the truth about the first genocide of the 20th Century. In Congress, the House Foreign Affairs Committee voted in favor of a resolution acknowledging as genocide the Turkish slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Armenians during the period 1915-1918, this despite a powerful Turkish lobby and White House efforts to derail the resolution. The current rationale for continuing this silence can...

Your April 23 editorial "Correcting a history of denial" is a powerful endorsement of the campaign to acknowledge as genocide the mass slaughter of Armenians in 1915. That a bipartisan group of 178 House members and 32 senators has written to President Bush, urging the U.S. to officially recognize and condemn the Armenian Genocide, brings renewed urgency to the effort to formally, albeit belatedly, address this historical injustice. To underscore the tragic and corrosive consequences of denial, consider that...

Eight years ago when I was traveling in the Caucasus, I decided to stop in the former Soviet republic of Armenia, a country and people I had long wanted to know. What I found was a land of utterly remarkable people that contradictorily struck me as one of the saddest places on Earth. Here was a people who were, until 1915, the dominant and most prosperous ethnic group in Eastern Turkey. Christians, with their own Armenian Orthodox Church and a language that has enriched the ages, their churches, castles...

Mathew Klujian, 100, loving husband of Grace, nee Minasian; father of four including Mathew Jr. (Susu), Edward, and Patricia (Jody) Jack; grandfather of six including Arpie (Geoff) Petkus, Haig (Nicole), and Sara (Jeff) Grzymkowski; great-grandfather of Keira Petkus and Mathew D. Klujian. Founder of Mathew Klujian and Son carpet company. One of the last survivors of the Armenian genocide. Visitation Friday, 4 to 9 p.m., with 8 p.m. wake service at Barr Funeral Home, 6222 N. Broadway, Chicago.

Khatoun Boyrazian, Armenian Genocide survivor, 86. Survived by children Krikor, Clara, Harout, Linda, Marie; and 13 grandchildren. Predeceased, husband, Yeghishe. Born in Marash, present day Turkey in 1920, in the midst of the Armenian Genocide. Her love will live in our hearts for generations to come. Her survival is the very essence why we will never forget. Visitation Wednesday, 4 to 9p.m. at Skaja Terrace Funeral Home,7812 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Niles, IL. Funeral service, Thursday, 11 a.m. St. Gregory the...

Every April 24, U.S. presidents commemorate the official day of remembrance of the Armenian genocide with a speech or statement carefully crafted to avoid use of the word "genocide." U.S. officials have avoided the word because Turkey, a key ally, strongly opposes the characterization to describe the early 20th Century deaths of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of Ottoman Turks. In the past, members of the House and Senate have proposed resolutions calling on...